Are college degrees necessary for employment?

Back in the economic boom times of August 2007, I wrote in an opinion column that:

Perhaps employers here in the United States use the college degree as a sorting tool just as employers in India do. By demonstrating that they successfully negotiated hazards like me, students implicitly tell prospective employers that they have the requisite skills to do the job. But then all we have done is unnecessarily raise the entry-level educational requirement, when in reality a degree is not really required and a high school diploma would have sufficed.

Well, thanks to this tweet from an author whose book was much talked about the past summer, I read an op-ed published in a different part of the country--Kentucky--where the authors (one is a grad student) write that "demand for college degrees increases joblessness":

... it's time to hold businesses accountable for their role in this mess.

The point is, businesses aren't innocent bystanders or even unwitting accomplices; they share in the guilt of the current system. In fixating on four-year degrees, businesses are also hurting themselves.

One of us works at Atkins & Pearce Inc., a Covington manufacturer that's been family-owned for seven generations and that, last year, won Kentucky's Mid-Sized Manufacturer of the Year. Some of the company's best employees — in accounting, in purchasing, in sales, even on the executive committee — do not have college degrees.

It's proof to us that, just because you can hire nothing but degree-holders, it doesn't mean you should.

The day that businesses decide that they don't need to hire college graduates for many of the jobs, well, the revolution will begin.  Until then, ...

Quote of the day: about faculty and universities

I suppose back-to-school has gotten me thinking a lot about higher education!
The following quote is a beauty:

the radical ambiguity of a profession in which one is hired for one purpose, expected to carry out another, and prized for achieving a third: teaching, research, and prestige are independent variables, besides being incommensurable per se. The upshot is as lively a set of anxieties for the agents and the responsible heads of the institution as one could hope to produce by teasing hamsters in electrified cages. Hence the peculiar governance and subdued restlessness of the American university.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement, you might all the more be impressed that the quote is from "The Academic Marketplace,  a 1958 treatise on scholarly prestige by the sociologists Theodore Caplow and Reese McGee."

Yes, prestige is a strange beast.  And it was prestige, or the perceived lack of, that triggered a lot of commotion on campus during the dog days of summer :)  The passing of fifty years means that the more things change, the more they do feel the same!

Nicholas Lemann says that higher education crisis is way overblown

I disagree with Nicholas Lemann, but in the spirit of being "fair and balanced" (yes, Faux Noose!) here are the concluding words from his piece in the New Yorker:

We have a lot of recent experience with breaking apart large, old, unlovely systems in the confidence of gaining great benefits at low cost. We deregulated the banking system. We tried to remake Iraq. In education, we would do well to appreciate what our country has built, and to try to fix what is undeniably wrong without declaring the entire system to be broken. We have a moral obligation to be precise about what the problems in American education are—like subpar schools for poor and minority children—and to resist heroic ideas about what would solve them, if those ideas don’t demonstrably do that. 

The biggest problem I have with his essay is this: in this short piece, Lemann clubs together the K-12 system with the higher education system.  

But, the problems in each have very little in common.  These are the metaphorical apples and oranges ...  I can't figure out why he chose this route for his commentary ...

How colleges flush money down the athletic toilet!

Not a topic new to this blog. 

This time, let me quote from this LA Times piece by the hottest contemporary critics of higher education (and apparently not my university's favorites!) Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus:

If you look at how that added revenue is being spent, it's hard to argue that students are getting a lot of extra value for all that extra money. Why? Colleges aren't spending their extra revenues, which we calculate to be about $40 billion a year nationally over 1980 revenues, in ways that most benefit students.

One thing colleges are spending more on is athletic teams, which have become a more pronounced — and costly — presence on campuses everywhere. Even volleyball teams travel extensively these days, with paid coaches and customized uniforms. Currently, 629 schools have football teams — 132 more than in 1980. And all but 14 of them lose money, including some with national names. It's true that alumni donations sometimes increase during winning seasons, but most of those gifts go specifically to athletics or other designated uses, not toward general educational programs.

On a percentage basis, I suspect that athletics at smaller schools require a larger percentage of subsidy from general funds than larger schools do; yes, I am basing this on our own experience.

The average football squad has gone from 82 to 102 players, due to sub-specialties required by esoteric coaching strategies. The number of women's sports teams has also risen sharply. Since 1980, for example, the number of women's soccer programs has soared from 80 to 956. And teams cost money — often lots of it. Varsity golf at Duke, open to both genders, costs an estimated $20,405 per player per year. Because there are no revenues for most sports, the deficits often have to be covered by tuition bills.

When higher education is no longer about the education part, and is so focused on entertainment, is it any wonder then that America seems to be falling behind?  These costly investments are only as good as ... well, like that old Iceland adage of peeing on yourself when out in the cold: feels nice and warm for a second, but in the end you are worse off than before!

So, what is the bottom line according to Hacker and Dreifus?

A whole generation of young Americans is being shortchanged, largely by adults who have carved out good careers in places we call colleges.

Or, as I tell my students sometimes: "you are screwed"

15 colleges worth their money ... and my colleagues protest?

A tweet from Claudia Dreifus led me to this story in the Washington Post, wherein the author notes about the 15 colleges worth the price, including the university where I teach:

Western Oregon University. Western Oregon, in the one traffic-light town of Monmouth, can value teaching over research, since it has no pretensions of reaching a higher tier. We found the students as bright as any we’ve met, and their professors bring out their best.

Consistent with their past remarks, I wonder if my colleagues will email their protests to WaPo :)

I think a huge "thank you" is in order from my institution and the faculty to Hacker and Dreifus; don't you, too?

Quote of the day: on American higher education

America’s universities lost their way badly in the era of easy money. If they do not find it again, they may go the way of GM.

Yep.
I have been writing and blogging about this for years, much to the displeasure of my colleagues :)

Anyway, that quote is from The Economist's Schumpeter column, where it is further noted that:

Two right-wing think-tanks, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Goldwater Institute, have both produced damning reports about America’s university system. Two left-wing academics, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, have published an even more damning book: “Higher Education? How Colleges are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It”. And US News & World Report, a centrist magazine, says in its annual survey of American colleges that: “If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with serious cost-cutting and painful reorganisations.”

The contemporary state of American higher education is under severe criticism from the right, left, and center; anybody feeling left out, please take a number and await your turn :)
So, ...

This luxury model is unlikely to survive what is turning into a prolonged economic downturn. Parents are much less willing to take on debt than they were and much more willing to look abroad for better deals. The internet also poses a growing threat to what Bill Gates calls “place-based colleges”. Online, you can listen to the world’s best lecturers for next to nothing.

Again, as far as I am concerned, Schumpeter is late to this party. I have consistently blogged about how such a system cannot continue anymore, and have repeatedly pointed to the online mode too.  But then, nobody listens to me, and if they do it is only to tell me that I have no free speech rights :)

I really, really, hope that the reforms will come from within. Because, those imposed from the outside will completely screw up the liberal education that I so cherish.

BTW, I had a delightful conversation with Claudia Dreifus.  First I got an email from her; apparently she had read something really interesting in my blog.  In my reply, I gave her my cell number, and a couple of hours it was Claudia Dreifus at the phone.  Her email and phone call made my day :)